Thursday, March 21, 2013

Just released from the giant publishing firm, Houghton Miflin Harcourt: A New
New Testament: A Bible for the 21st Century Combining Traditional and Newly
Discovered Texts, edited by Hal Taussig.

The advertisement from HMH
distributed widely via email last week was not shy in its claims for the
600-page volume. The subject line read, “It is time for a new New Testament.” In
the email blast are strong endorsements by Marcus Borg, Karen King, and Barbara
Brown Taylor.

Borg and King, like Taussig, were members of the Jesus
Seminar (a group headed up by the late Robert W. Funk, which determined which
words and deeds of Jesus recorded in the Gospels were authentic).

King
and Taylor are on the Council for A New New Testament. All of them share a
viewpoint which seems to be decidedly outside that of the historic Christian
faith, regardless of whether it is Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant.

The
New Books

The title of the book sounds provocative; the reality is just
as much so. “A council of scholars and spiritual leaders” was convened to
determine which books besides the traditional 27 should be added to the New
Testament. Significantly, it’s not called a “council of scholars and church
leaders” for a reason.

Although, to be sure, there were bona fide
scholars on the council, not all were church leaders; arguably, in fact, almost
none were. The council of 19—including two rabbis—examined several ancient
writings which the jacket blurb euphemistically calls ‘scriptures’ and
determined which of these worthies deserved a place at the table with original
New Testament books.
Ten books were selected for this honor, along with two prayers and one song.
The song (if that’s the right term) is called “The Thunder: Perfect Mind” and is
one of the Nag Hammadi codices.

There are no references to it in the
ancient world; it never mentions Jesus and may, in fact, have been written three
centuries before he was born.Some of the council members wanted it to be
listed first in the New New Testament, in spite of (or because of?) its apparent
non-Christian perspective.

How it is possible for the jacket blurb to
say this book was ancient ‘scripture’ when our only knowledge of it comes from
Nag Hammadi staggers the mind.

Here is the list of new books added to the
New Testament by this council:

•The Prayer of Thanksgiving•The Prayer
of the Apostle Paul•The Thunder: Perfect Mind•The Gospel of
Thomas•The Gospel of Mary•The Gospel of Truth•The Acts of Paul and
Thecla•The Letter of Peter to Philip•The Secret Revelation of
John•The First, Second, Third, and Fourth Books of the Odes of
Solomon

What strikes one immediately is that most of these additions seem
to be of two types: Gnostic or proto-Gnostic essays and writings that exalt
women.Further, what is also striking are books that did not make the cut.
Among them are the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas,
First Clement, and other books in the collection known as the Apostolic
Fathers.

In other words, the books selected by the council were selected
with an agenda in mind; they were not chosen because they ever made a serious
claim to canonicity. Indeed, as was mentioned above, at least one of them is not
even mentioned in any extant ancient writing.

Consider again the writings
of the Apostolic Fathers. These are writings that were considered orthodox in
that they offer a similar viewpoint on doctrinal and practical matters as is
found in the New Testament. They are purportedly written by first-generation
disciples of the original apostles, though in some cases they are another
generation removed.

The Shepherd of Hermas was so highly regarded in the
ancient church that we have more copies of it from before AD 300 than we do the
Gospel of Mark.The Muratorian Canon speaks highly of it but stops short of
treating it as bearing the same authority as the New Testament books because of
its known recent vintage (mid-second century).

But certainly the
Shepherd has far better credentials than any of the 13 newly discovered writings
for canonization. That the ancient church rejected even this document is
implicitly damning evidence that none of the new discoveries really belong
within the pages of Holy Writ.

We will revisit this issue of the ancient
church’s view of authoritative writings at the end of this short
review.

The Council of Nineteen and the Ancient Church
Councils

The council of nineteen that is attempting to do nothing less
than reshape Christianity into an image more compatible with their worldview
requires some scrutiny.

Who are these people and on what basis does this
council have any binding authority on anyone? Most of them are professors,
pastors, authors, or rabbis.

I cannot say for sure, but I do not believe
that any one of them would consider themselves to be orthodox in the sense of
holding to the seven universal creeds of the ancient church. John Dominic
Crossan and Karen King are perhaps the best known scholars in the
group.

All we are told about their purported authority to add thirteen
writings to the New Testament (bringing the total to 40, a number which often
speaks of trials and judgment in the Bible!) is that this group was “modeled on
early church councils of the first six centuries CE that made important
decisions for larger groups of Christians” (A New New Testament, 555). But the
similarities with the ancient councils stop there. Perhaps this is why nothing
more is said.

The ancient church sent representatives to the great
councils who would make decisions that the churches agreed were to be binding on
all. These ancient councils especially hammered out doctrinal
issues.

And today, all branches of Christendom embrace the decisions and
viewpoints of these universal councils as at least good guidelines on what
constitutes orthodoxy, if not fully authoritative.

There is one key
exception to this: the liberal Protestant branch of the church rejects these
councils because it rejects the divinity and bodily resurrection of Christ. And
the council of nineteen?

I cannot speak for all of them, but a good
portion of them at least are adamantly against Christ’s deity, his bodily
resurrection, his atoning death, the Trinity, and that the Bible has any kind of
authority in doctrinal matters.

And they certainly did not conduct their
meetings in the spirit of the ancient councils. Those councils were populated by
persecuted Christians, representing the major churches and sees, who came to
theological decisions based on the final deposit of revelation in the New
Testament.

Many of them were exiled or lost their lives after the state
was swept along by every wind of doctrine while the persecuted saints remained
steadfast in their beliefs.

The council of nineteen may claim some
semblance to these ancient councils, but there is more dissemblance than
semblance in the their attempted coup.

Ancient Canon Decisions

As
for thinking through what belonged in the New Testament, there was no universal
church council that ever made an official list. Here is another point of
incongruity between this postmodern council and the ancient ones: the council of
nineteen has, by its own self-asserted authority, pronounced a verdict on what
goes into the New Testament. At least they did not throw out the Gospel of John,
something that more than one member of the Jesus Seminar was wont to
do!

Even though there was no ancient universal council regarding the New
Testament canon (suggesting, in the words of Bruce Metzger, that the canon is a
list of authoritative books [the Reformed view] rather than an authoritative
list of books [the Catholic view]), the ancient church did follow three basic
guidelines: apostolicity, orthodoxy, catholicity. These will be briefly
explained below.

Apostolicity meant that a book had to be written by an
apostle or an associate of an apostle if it was to be included in the New
Testament. Practically speaking, this meant that any document written after the
end of the first century was automatically disqualified.

This is why the
Muratorian Canon—the first orthodox canon list, composed in the late second
century—rejected the Shepherd of Hermas as authoritative, even though it
considered it to be very beneficial to Christians.

Further, any book
that was known to be a forgery was rejected by the ancient church. Not one of
the thirteen books proposed by the council of nineteen was written by the person
it is ascribed to.

The ancient church would—and often did—immediately
reject such books because of their spurious nature. The test of apostolicity
alone thus disqualifies all thirteen newly discovered books. Relatively
speaking, almost all of these newly discovered books should also be called new
books.

Orthodoxy meant that those books considered for canonical status
needed to conform to what was already known to be orthodox. Orthodoxy was known
even before any writings were accepted as scripture.

It was known
through hymns, the kerygma, and the traditions passed down by the apostles. If
there never had been a New Testament, we would still have enough to go on to
guide us as to what essential Christianity looked like. And it looked nothing
like most of the thirteen books proposed by this new council.

The
Gnostic and proto-Gnostic books were soundly rejected by the ancient church. And
even those that were closer to orthodoxy (like The Acts of Paul and Thecla) were
rejected because they failed the test of apostolicity.

To put The Gospel
of Thomas, The Gospel of Mary, and The Gospel of Truth into the New Testament,
side by side with writings that embraced a diametrically-opposed view of the
Christian faith, is unspeakably brash.

And although Professor Taussig
and his friends think they are doing Christendom a favor by including known
heretical writings in their expanded New Testament, they are doing so at both
the cost of historical integrity and pedagogical method.

This can only
confuse laypeople, yet even Barbara Brown Taylor—considered one of the ten best
preachers in America, and thus someone who knows better than to create Chicken
Littles out of the chaos that this tome will almost surely incite—has endorsed
the plan and layout of this volume. Orthodoxy seemed to be the furthest thing
from the minds of the New New Testament council.

Finally, catholicity was
a criterion used in deciding what earned a place at the table of the New
Testament canon. By ‘catholicity’ I do not mean Roman Catholicism. No, I mean
that for a book to make the cut it generally needed to be accepted by all the
churches.

To be sure, some New Testament books struggled in this
department, but not all did. In fact, within a century of the completion of the
New Testament, the ancient church throughout the Mediterranean world achieved a
remarkable unanimity concerning at least twenty of the twenty-seven books. This
included all thirteen letters ascribed to Paul and the four Gospels.

The
rest would find acceptance by the fourth century, in both the eastern and
western branches of the church. Most of the new additions to the New Testament
fail this test miserably, too. Again, catholicity is not something that the
council of nineteen considered when deciding on what books to put
in.

Rather, catholicity is something that this book aims to achieve. And
yet it does so principally through a Gnostic-like route: by urging Christians to
accept these books on the basis of their largely politically correct viewpoint,
the council is seeking to reshape Christianity into something more palatable to
the postmodern world, where presumably knowledge replaces
faith.

Conclusion

In short, the New New Testament is a wolf in
sheep’s clothing. The council that put these books forth is a farce. It has
nothing to do with the councils of old, yet implicitly seeks to claim authority
on the basis of concocted semblance.

The books were selected by those
who, though certainly having a right to scholarly examination of the Christian
faith, are not at all qualified to make any pronouncements on canon. That
belongs to the church, the true church. Outsiders may address, critique, and
comment on the New Testament.They have that right—a right given them by the
very nature of the Bible: this book is the only sacred document of any major
religion which consistently subjects itself to historical
inquiry.

Unlike the Bhagavad Gita, the Teachings of the Compassionate
Buddha, the Qur’an, or the Gospel of Thomas, the Bible is not just talking
heads, devoid of historical facts, places, and people.

It is a book that
presents itself as historical, and speaks about God’s great acts in history,
intersecting with humanity in verifiable ways. This is where orthodoxy and
heterodoxy should meet, dialoging and debating over whether the Bible is in any
sense true. But to suspend the discussion by a sleight of hand is both cowardly
and bombastic.

Epilogue: The Value of the New New Testament

After
reading the critique above, one might be tempted to ask, “Apart from that, Mrs.
Lincoln, what did you think of the play?” There actually is value in this
book—even, I think, for laypeople.

These are important ancient books
that show both continuity with the early church and discontinuity. Some are
essentially orthodox; most are subchristian.

But they represent how
ancients perceived the Christ event and remind us that even in the early period
not all ‘Christian’ groups truly embraced Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of
God.

Heresy is found in the earliest period of the Christian faith, too:
it dogged the apostle Paul and even found a home in some of his churches after
he left for other mission fields.

At bottom, the question that we must
all grapple with, and what many of these ancient writings grappled with, is
this: What will you do with Jesus of Nazareth? That question is still the most
important one that anyone can ever ask.

Redefining marriage to include same-sex couples would jettison the rationale and logic behind prohibitions on polygamous marriages, according to several friend-of-the court briefs urging the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the traditional definition of marriage.

"Ultimately, there is no principled basis for recognizing a legality of same-sex marriage without simultaneously providing a basis for the legality of consensual polygamy or certain adult incestuous relationships," reads one of the briefs, filed by the Christian legal group Liberty Counsel. "In fact, every argument for same-sex marriage is an argument for them as well."

Over the next three days, Baptist Press will preview some of the legal arguments made by supporters of traditional marriage ahead of Tuesday's and Wednesday's oral arguments. On those days the court will consider the constitutionality of two laws: California's Proposition 8 and a section of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Prop 8 is a state constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman in California, while the DOMA section in question defines marriage in federal law in the traditional sense. If both are overturned, then gay marriage likely would be legalized in all 50 states.

A friend-of-the-court brief signed by 18 state attorneys general also briefly warns about the potential legalization of polygamy if gay marriage is legalized. The brief -- which supports Prop 8 -- says the traditional definition of marriage is tied to the fact that only a man and woman can reproduce, thus continuing society's very existence. The state has an interest, the brief says, to see that children are raised, ideally, by the mother and father who beget them. A mother and father in each home is "optimal for children and society at large."

"Once the natural limits that inhere in the relationship between a man and a woman can no longer sustain the definition of marriage, the conclusion that follows is that any grouping of adults would have an equal claim to marriage," the attorneys general brief states, arguing that marriage no longer would be about the needs of children but about the desires of adults.

A friend-of-the-court brief supporting Prop 8 by three academians, including Harvard's Robert P. George, says there is a movement in the United States to see group relations recognized by the government.

"Nor are such relationships unheard of: Newsweek reports that there are more than five hundred thousand in the United States alone," the brief signed by George reads.

Liberty Counsel's brief quotes 19th century Supreme Court cases that upheld the federal government's ban on polygamy in Utah. Among them were Reynolds v. United States (1878) and Murphy v. Ramsey (1885). In the 1885 case, the justices affirmed the traditional definition of marriage, writing that laws are "wholesome and necessary" when they are established on the basis of the idea of the family as "consisting in and springing from the union for life of one man and one woman in the holy estate of matrimony." The court called traditional marriage "the sure foundation of all that is stable and noble in our civilization."

Liberty Counsel asserted that "when the traditional definition of marriage as that between one man and one woman is reversed to include other marriages, the state is left with little, if any, justification for other laws restricting marriage."

"For example," the Liberty Counsel brief warns, "some might argue that larger family groups (of 3 or more adults) would provide an even stronger private support network than the two-adult model. Or, marriage between certain close relatives would minimize the number of legal heirs, potentially minimizing disputes over property distribution upon death. At a minimum, there is nothing inherent in polygamous or certain incestuous relationships (e.g., consenting adults who are related, but not by blood) that makes those unions less worthy of state recognition under such criteria."

In passing Prop 8, the state of California could have rationally concluded that marriage is "society's way of recognizing that the sexual union of one man and one woman is unique, and that government needs to regulate and support this union for the benefit of society and its children," Liberty Counsel said. California also could have concluded that despite "the personal fulfillment of intimate adult relationships, marriage laws are not primarily about adult needs for approbation and support, but about the well-being of children and society."

"This court," the brief says, "has long understood the importance of the marriage union as between one man and one woman."

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About Me

I have been in Christian ministry for over thirty years. I have served as a Pastor, missionary, chaplain, and I am currently working as a prayer couselor at CBN. This past year I celebrated my 50th spiritual birthday. I have had an active prophetic ministry for 27 years.